Praise for Boy Racer

“Boy Racer is Mark Cavendish’s brash, brutal and honest story of his life on the bike, full of the sound and fury of hand-to-hand combat at the finish line. Cavendish holds nothing back.”

—Sal Ruibal, USA Today

“Boy Racer . . . catch[es] the inner conflict between the impetuousness that makes Cavendish such a daunting competitor and the introspection that makes him such an interesting person.”

—The Guardian

“Refreshingly frank and entertaining.”—Scotland on Sunday

“Boy Racer is essentially a master class in the art of winning, relayed through the eyes of a young, hungry, and sometimes impatient embryo superstar with a penchant for entertaining industrial language. It is also highly per-sonal and revelatory and gives you a unique insight into one of Britain’s most successful and respected sportsmen worldwide.”

—Daily Telegraph

“Few have brought the terrifying and visceral art of sprinting to life. Boy Racer redresses the balance.”

—The Times

“This book surprises and inspires with outspoken views, insider insights, and a life story to date full of fantastic highs and devastating lows. With the 2008 Tour de France as a backdrop, Cavendish takes us on a whirlwind tour of his life so far—a meteoric rise from young Isle of Man ‘scally’ to double World Champion track star. Along the way we learn of his apprenticeship with the GB track development team, getting taken on by the infamous T-Mobile squad (now Columbia-Highroad), and winning the Milan–San Remo classic. Inspiring reading.”

—www.spoke.ie

“Offers a unique account of the world’s fastest sprinter.”—www.roadcyclinguk.com

“I have read a large number of sporting autobiographies in my time; some very good, many distinctly mediocre. This might just be the best one I have ever read.

“The book reads in much the same way the man conducts himself in interviews: He shoots from the hip with his heart on his sleeve, occasionally inserting foot in mouth. But anyone who has ever seen Cav speak would expect no less; in a PC, PR-conscious world, here is a sportsman who is as brutally honest as he is fast. At times, it is painfully obvious who he does and does not respect in the cycling world, and yet he is surprisingly self-critical, self-effacing, and not afraid to admit when he has been proven wrong about someone. The book is full of little insights into the mindset of a master practitioner and behind-the-scenes revelations of what it is like to be a professional road cyclist, which make this a cut above the aver-age sporting autobiography. Add this to the fleshing out of a personality far more complex, meticulous, and magnanimous (to his team) than the one-dimensional cocky narcissist sometimes portrayed in the media, and what you have here is a compelling tale that had me tearing through the pages much like the man himself does when he has the sniff of the finish line in his nostrils.

“Boy Racer was unputdownable. I’ll be first in line to buy the next chapter of the story of this incredible young man.”

—sportingreflections.blogspot.com

“Love the man or hate him, you won’t find much in Boy Racer to change your mind. It’s pure Cav—honest, outspoken, occasionally aggressive, imbued throughout with that trademark self-confidence you already find either charming or annoying. Even if you’re not a fan, this kind of peek into the peloton makes the book well worth reading. But if (like me) you do harbor a certain fondness for the Manx Express, chances are you’ll tear through this book with sheer delight and find yourself quoting bits of it for weeks to come.”

—www.podiumcafe.com

“Can a youngster obsessed with barging his way through several other bicycle missiles in a 70-kph scrabble string more than a couple of words together? Happily, the answer to that one is a resounding yes. This is an exceptionally well-written book; well-constructed, never tedious, well-paced, and above all else, highly interesting.

“There won’t be any difficulty getting to [the final page]; probably more of a problem putting it down in between. Quite a surprisingly good book.”

—www.thewashingmachinepost.net

Copyright © 2010 by Mark Cavendish

Published in 2009 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing A Random House Group company

U.S. edition with additional material published in 2010 by VeloPress

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or photocopy or

otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations within critical articles and reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

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(303) 440-0601 • Fax (303) 444-6788 E-mail velopress@competitorgroup.com

Distributed in the United States and Canada by Ingram Publisher Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cavendish, Mark.

Boy Racer : my journey to Tour de France record-breaker / Mark Cavendish. p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-934030-64-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Tour de France (Bicycle race). I. Title.

GV1049.2.T68C38 2010 796.6'20944—dc22

2010015130

For information on purchasing VeloPress books, please call (800) 811-4210, ext. 169, or visit www.velopress.com.

Cover design by Katie Jennings Interior design by Anita Koury

Cover photograph by Graham Watson Text set in Whitman

10 11 12 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE vii

INTRODUCTION 1

STAGE 1: Brest-Plumelec 15

STAGE 2: Auray–Saint Brieuc 29

STAGE 3: Saint-Malo–Nantes 43

STAGE 4: Cholet-Cholet 67

STAGE 5: Cholet-Châteauroux 87

STAGE 6: Aigurande–Super Besse 95

STAGE 7: Brioude-Aurillac 103

STAGE 8: Figeac-Toulouse 121

STAGE 9: Toulouse–Bagnères de Bigorre 139

STAGE 10: Pau-Hautacam 145

STAGE 11: Lannemezan-Foix 163

STAGE 12: Lavelanet-Narbonne 183

STAGE 13: Narbonne-Nîmes 199

STAGE 14: Nîmes–Digne Les Bains 213

MILAN–SAN REMO: 2009 229

EPILOGUE 259

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 287

vii

PROLOGUE

“Brian, I need you to do me a favor. I need you to call Unibet.”Brian was Brian Holm, my Columbia Sportswear team’s Danish di-

recteur sportif, and Unibet was an online betting company. Brian knew what I meant. I could tell from the way he was smirking; but sitting next to him, my other directeur, Rolf Aldag, thought he’d either misheard or that I’d gone insane. He leaned over Brian in the passenger seat to get a clearer view and asked me to repeat what I’d just said.

“I need you to call Unibet and put a grand on Mark Cavendish to win today’s stage. Got it?”

Now Rolf was laughing. . . .

A hundred kilometers to go. A hundred kilometers and not much more than two hours until the most important ten seconds of my life. Hope-fully. I spotted the huge bundle of varicose veins that belongs to my teammate George Hincapie, and I kicked through a little window of daylight between the bodies and on to his shoulder. “Hey, George, I just went back to the car and told them I needed them to call Unibet for me. . . .” By the time I’d finished the story, he was laughing so much he nearly fell off his bike.

Ninety kilometers, 80, 70, 60 to go. It was hot—the first really warm day of the Tour, and the sun happened to have showed up on a day when there was precious little shelter, just endless wheat fields acting like giant solar panels. Drink, Cav, gotta keep drinking. Four riders were still off the front, but now wasn’t the time to start fretting. Not yet. At the

Copyright 2010 VeloPress All rights reserved.Excerpt from the U.S. edition of Boy Racer by Mark Cavendish.

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50-kilometers-to-go mark, I’d start picking my way through the maze and into the top twenty or thirty positions, close to my teammates and as far as possible from danger. My teammates might not see me, but they’d see my long white socks—the socks I wore deliberately so they could pick me out in the melee—I’d drift on to a wheel, maybe George’s, maybe Bernie’s, maybe Kosta’s, then the thinking, the planning, the wondering would all stop and the focusing would start. Nothing would count except the next turn of the pedals, the next shift of the gear lever, the next tweak of the handlebars, the next inch of tarmac.

As far as I was concerned, you could psychoanalyze a bike race as much as you liked, but it basically boiled down to just you, the bike, and the road. The British Cycling team’s full-time psychiatrist, Steve Peters, had earned a lot of praise for his work with track stars like Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton, and rightly so, because I could see how much Steve had helped them.

I could see that Steve had helped them think logically, override emo-tion and doubt—but I didn’t need any of that. I’d been to see Steve once, before becoming world Madison champion in Los Angeles in 2005, but nothing he’d said had really helped me to conquer my nerves. What I needed was the approach favored by another of the staff at the British Cycling Federation, Shane Sutton: Basically, I needed sunshine blown up my arse.

A lot of professional athletes have performance anxiety or whatever psychology wants to call it, but winners, born winners like me, just want sunshine blown up their arses. Or if you prefer a slightly less vulgar trans-lation, I don’t want the truth—I just want to be told I’m the best. Logic states that a sprinter can’t win the Tour de France overall. That’s because it’s written in the laws of nature that the same muscles that allow me to touch speeds of 70 kilometers an hour on the flat make me a liability in the mountains, which is invariably where the Tour is won and lost. But that’s only logic; if you could wire Shane Sutton to blow sunshine up my arse twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, then forget a thousand

Copyright 2010 VeloPress All rights reserved.Excerpt from the U.S. edition of Boy Racer by Mark Cavendish.

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PROLOGUE

pounds on me winning a sprint stage—you could do worse than putting a few grand on me winning the whole bloody Tour.

I’ve told Steve Peters my views on sports psychology, and he’s not of-fended. We get on fine. I just don’t think I’m like most other athletes, not even the Olympic medal winners in the British team, and Steve accepts that. The other thing to consider is that a lot of people whom Steve has helped are doing timed events on the track, where the variables can be controlled and performances quantified in terms of minutes, seconds, and milliseconds. What I was doing here was different, and that’s why I loved it. It was pointless telling me, “You’ve done your best, everything you can do”; it was pointless showing me a line on a graph that told me how much I was improving. The only line I looked for was the finish line.

Fifty kilometers. An hour, hour and ten minutes, at this speed. We weren’t going to make the same mistake as two days ago and let the break stay away. I wasn’t going through that again: the anger at having let down my teammates, the self-loathing, the regrets, the silence on the team bus, the dumb questions from journalists. . . . Fortunately, the gap was now down to two minutes and falling fast. Our jerseys had flooded the front of the bunch—seven of us in blue, then Kim Kirchen in the green that denotes the leader of the points competition and Thomas Lövkvist in the white worn by the best rider under the age of 25 on the general classification. Marcus Burghardt and Adam Hansen were on the front; over the next two and a half weeks, those two would rarely be anywhere but on the front, riding themselves to a pulp to keep me, my team, and everyone else in the race exactly where we wanted them.

Stay there, Cav, stay there. And on the intercom radio with Brian and Rolf: “Cav, how are you feeling?”

“Fucking amazing . . .”I was cruising right in the sweet spot—that magical place, like a magic

carpet, right at the base of the arrowhead, maybe twenty positions behind the point of the triangle, where your energy expenditure—and risk—is minimized. Fifteen kilometers to go.

Copyright 2010 VeloPress All rights reserved.Excerpt from the U.S. edition of Boy Racer by Mark Cavendish.

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PROLOGUE

Come on, Cav, nothing silly now.At the Giro, I’d locked my radio to “on” with 10 kilometers to go so that

my teammates and directeurs could hear me but couldn’t relay back any information or instructions. Here in France, I’d asked if we could do the same and been outvoted. I’m not sure which approach is better, but I do know that when I heard a crackle in my ear and the words “George has punctured, George has punctured,” I was absolutely sure I’d seen George Hincapie for the last time on Stage 5 of the Tour de France.

I’d ridden enough Tour stages now to know that if I’ve dropped out of the top thirty positions anywhere in the final 30 kilometers, when the pace never drops below 50 kph, I’ve also dropped out of contention to win the stage. Lose touch with the peloton, be it because of a crash or a puncture, and you can forget about it altogether . . . except, apparently, if your name’s George Hincapie. No sooner had I written him off than, with 7 kilometers to go, suddenly there was that varicose spaghetti again, and George was back in the game. To get there, he’d had to stop, wait for the team car, change wheels, almost rip the cranks of his bike to get back to the bunch, accelerate again, up the gutter, overtaking about 150 of the best cyclists in the world riding at full bore, giving his life insur-ers a nasty fright in the process, then compose himself to slot back into my sprint train and start the real hard work. And people ask me what I mean when I say I’ve got the best teammates in the world.

There’s a clip on YouTube that shows us 5 kilometers out—Adam Hansen on the front, Marcus Burghardt on his wheel, then Tommy Lövkvist talking on his radio with me in his shadow—all set to the Safri Duo track “Rise.” It still gives me goose pimples. I could sense the other sprinters’ teams—Liquigas, Quick-Step, and Crédit Agricole—trying to move up and muscle in, but today it was our turn to dictate. All day we’d been dictating.

Four kilometers. Three. Ideally, you’d want at least four men at this point. However, Adam had just popped, and so had Tommy. That left two—Bernie Eisel and Gerald Ciolek. In our eagerness, in the excitement, we’d committed too early.

Copyright 2010 VeloPress All rights reserved.Excerpt from the U.S. edition of Boy Racer by Mark Cavendish.

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Come on, Cav, stay calm. Just hold the wheels. Remember the tight right-hander with 2 kilometers to go—then the last kilometer’s straight and wide. Don’t think about Hushovd or McEwen or Steegmans. You’re the quickest today. Focus. Watch the wheels. And remember that right-hander. . . .

The right-hander, Cav, the right-hander! Too wide. Blown it. Now you’re going backward. Boxed in. Five back, ten back . . . Where’s Gerald? There. Legend. He’s taking me round the outside. “I’m with you, Gerald.” There’s the red flag: a kilometer to go. A kilo—? Gerald’s already in the wind, and he can’t hold a kilometer. No way. Just do what you can, Gerald. I’m here. Stay calm, Cav.

Everyone who’s never been there wants to know what’s going through your mind in the last kilometer of a sprint. The answer may be a disap-pointment: It’s nothing, except what’s needed to process precisely what’s flashing in front of your eyes at any given moment. There’s no reflection, no calculation, no speculation—just endless, split-second decisions and gambles. It’s “Left or right?” “This wheel or that wheel?” “Wait or go?” It takes hundreds of these decisions to win a sprint, but it might take only one to lose it.

If it’s not instinct, it’s the closest thing to it.How long is a Tour de France sprint? Two hundred fifty meters? Three

hundred? Are we talking the whole drumroll or just the climax? The 50-kilometer, hour-long, 600-watt test of collective power, endurance, and concentration or the ten-second, 1,200-watt, 70-kph drag race that everyone sees and remembers?

A great sprinter doesn’t need to be a great strategist. When you’re on that finishing straight, timing trumps tactics every time. At the Tour, the black distance markers at the side of the road act as your countdown: one every 100 meters in the penultimate 500 meters, one every 50 in the last 500—300 might be too soon to go, 200 too late. Sometimes it’s someone else who takes the initiative, and you simply don’t have any option but to step on the gas.

Seven hundred. Six hundred. What’s that jersey up the road? Fuck me! We haven’t even caught the break yet! One of them’s still up the road. How did

Copyright 2010 VeloPress All rights reserved.Excerpt from the U.S. edition of Boy Racer by Mark Cavendish.

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that happen? How the fuck did he . . . No, forget it, Cav. Focus. You’ll catch him. Focus on the sprint.

We’re on the outside of the swarm, and suddenly there’s a surge. I don’t see it, but I feel it. I can always just feel it. It’s too early and Gerald’s already had to do too much, but I need one last effort. I scream, “Gerald, you’ve got to go!” So he goes, like an Exocet, right into the wind, and he goes and goes and goes. Last 500, last 450, he’s still going, last 400, 375, and is he still . . . no, he’s not, he’s seizing up, starting to swing. He’s gonna blow any second . . . and I can feel someone coming on my right. It’s a green jersey, it’s Crédit Agricole, it’s Mark Renshaw, with Thor Hushovd on his wheel, and I wait for Hushovd to appear on my right shoulder, then I swing across Gerald and suddenly level with Hushovd’s back wheel.

The most important ten seconds of my life. The next ten . . .

Copyright 2010 VeloPress All rights reserved.Excerpt from the U.S. edition of Boy Racer by Mark Cavendish.